‘The House of Bernarda Alba’: A Tyrant’s Cage
A review of ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’, by Federico García Lorca; 1945.
The play opens with a funeral. Bernarda Alba’s second husband has perished, and in line with the family tradition, the matriarch imposes an eight-year period of mourning. None of her daughters, aged between twenty and thirty-nine, are allowed any contact with the outside world. ‘In Church,’ she says, ‘women should look at no man but the priest, and at him only because he’s wearing skirts.’ Thus she sets the tone for what follows: a reign of terror masked as propriety. The daughters obey, but only in appearance. Beneath the silence, there is rebellion, whispered and unseen, like magma bubbling away inside in a volcano.
The eldest daughter, Angustias, has one advantage: money. When Bernarda’s first husband died, she inherited a large sum of cash. Her wealth has attracted a suitor from the village, the young, attractive Pepe ‘el Romano’. Her sisters envy her: it is unjust, they think, that the plain, sickly Angustias should have not just the money but the man. And it is the youngest daughter, Adela, who truly wants him, and desire is the handmaid of defiance. She wears a green dress when the others are in black. She tries to get Pepe to see her. The middle sisters—Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio—are caught (fittingly) in the middle, torn between sister and sister, mother and both. The only honest voice in the house belongs to Poncia, the servant, who sees everything but can do nothing.
The eldest daughter, Angustias, has one advantage: money. When Bernarda’s first husband died, she inherited a large sum of cash.
Needless to say, but a family cannot remain under such serious strain before something snaps. It does. The pain and suffering that would inevitably come about makes a mockery of Bernarda Alba’s claims to control. Bernarda believes she can rule not just her daughters, but fate—reality itself. She will not hear otherwise. She cannot bear to hear otherwise. So she ignores the pleas of her daughters, the counsel of her elderly mother Maria Josefa. For she knows best:
MAGDALENA: …I know I’m not going to marry. I’d rather carry sacks to the mill. Anything except sit here day after day in this dark room.
BERNARDA: That’s what a woman is for.
MAGDALENA: Cursed be all women.
BERNARDA: In this house you’ll do what I order. You can’t run with the story to your father any more. Needle and thread for women. Whiplash and mules for men. That’s the way it has to be for people who have certain obligations.
There are many timeless themes that run through La casa de Bernarda Alba, none more marked than tyranny and repression. Power corrupts, as Lord Action warned us; and cruel, unreasonable, and arbitrary power leads to repression. Repression breeds destruction, as the forces quashed gather in strength and explode. When love is one of those forces, the explosion is one of madness. But, despite its being written and performed during the Spanish Civil War, this is no political commentary. It is a play of women: indeed, the subtitle is a drama of women in the villages of Spain. Lorca is interested not only in the repression wrought by Bernarda but the repression of which she is a victim. For her class, culture and fear are, for Lorca, the roots of—if not an excuse for—her villainy.
The exclusion of any male character from the action—Pepe ‘el Romano’ never actually appears on stage—strengthens the sexual tension that builds throughout the play. We know that it cannot go on. Lorca has a deep understanding of its machinery. The play takes the shape of a slow march to execution, with each act adding to the strain. The silences, the heat, the thirst, the thick black mourning dresses—all these are symbols of lives crushed under the weight of tradition. If men are physically absent, then they are, as it were, there in spirit: for Lorca, men hold all the power, and they are responsible for the women’s situation. When Pepe el Romano comes up, all the characters fail the Bechdel Test spectacularly. His name moves from mouth to mouth like a spell, or a virus. He, by dint of being part of the class in power, becomes a symbol, the embodiment of freedom and the world beyond.
If men are physically absent, then they are, as it were, there in spirit: for Lorca, men hold all the power.
The tragedy of Bernarda is that she does not see she is enforcing rules that she did not create, and that do not serve her or her kind. Her authority is only respected in person: the moment that she turns her back, those she seeks to dominate rebel. She commands silence, but the house is fulled with noise: canes snapping, doors slamming, cries into the night. Her tyranny is no match for reality. And so she comes to seem hopelessly at sea, clinging to the life-raft of her petty authority on waves that are utterly indifferent to her. She is delusional; and yet Lorca writes without delusion. He uses straightforward language, spare and simple imagery, precise detail. It is a lean play, without melodrama, stripped of its excesses, yet charged with feeling.
Lorca was a great poet of the female experience in the Spain of his time. This was perhaps because, as a gay man, he empathised with their experience. Or perhaps it was because his mother, with whom he was close, encouraged his artistic talents and was a great influence on him. It was perhaps because he had strong friendships with women, or because women happened to be at the heart of Andalusian folk tradition. Certainly he saw women as expressing duende—the spirit of evocation, of tragic, poetic emotion—most powerfully. For Lorca, women were not passive sufferers under a rigid patriarchal regime. In his work, they are full of yearning, rage, defiance. He elevated their experience, showing that they acted on the world through emotional force, and that this was in no way less valid or less interesting—the opposite, in fact—than the actions of the men who oppressed them.
